October 2005 Entries
My younger brother, Rob, Creative Product Design student at the University of the West of England, has done an amazing job in winning an award hosted by the Design Council of Great Britain! He was picked out of all of the people on his course to go on a work placement and take part in the scheme, and together with a business student, they managed to design a new product for an established company and present such a solid business case for it that they went through the regional finals and were selected to go through to the national finals....
While I was working down at Microsoft Reading earlier this year, I was surprised to see a film crew hanging around the office doing all kinds of strange things. Turns out, they were making a marketing video.
I saw the finished article for the first time at PDC as I waited for the last keynote session of the conference to start - I kept prodding James and saying "I was sitting next to him!" and "I saw them doing that!" etc. I had a search to see if I could find a link to the clip when I got back, but...
With baby on the way, we decided it was time to change one of our Ford Pumas for a slightly (and only slightly) more practical car (5 doors required). After much searching, we finally settled on getting a new Mazda 3 Sakata special edition and put down a deposit on Saturday.
As a result, we needed to decide which Puma to sell, and given that Fray is a bit younger, we decided that it was Xena, the Black edition Puma, who was to be put up for sale.
For those interested, please head to our website and check out the details!
I have a bit of a background in both editing and writing technical documentation, so I often have to describe situations where users of a system can do stuff based on the roles that they are member of.... no, try again... their membership of system roles? Now that just sounds a bit clunky.
You see, although the acceptability of ending a sentence with a preposition is quite high in modern English as spoken and written by the masses, I really don't like the use of the word "of" in particular at the end of a sentence. It just looks plain...
Just thought I'd write a quick blog to enthuse about the film from Joss Whedon called Serenity - it opened in the UK last weekend and we popped to the Vue cinema at Starcity (Birmingham) to see it on Friday night. It was a fabulous film - even if you hadn't seen the short-lived Firefly TV series "prequel", there was enough back story in there to make the film feel complete and flesh out the characters to the point that you could understand them.
The most refreshing thing about the film is the amount of emotion it manages to convey across the...
We had our second scan yesterday (the 20 week scan, as it's called, though I'm actually at 22 weeks today - all because we were away on holiday!). Everything popped into focus very quickly, and there was our little baby, wriggling away, having a big yawn and a stretch. The radiographer / sonographer had a good look around, measuring the head, length, and checking the spine and heart - all looked to be developing well!
So the question was raised - did we want to find out the sex? We were both very keen to know - I've hated having to...
Getting to New York was a bit of a nightmare - it was an early start, but we managed to get to the airport with about an hour to spare. Unfortunately, we had run out of cash, and some bright spark decided to hide the ATM in the airport significantly far away from the entrance of the airport to cost us at least 5 minutes. The next hurdle was attempting to figure out how to check in - normally a simple and easy process, involving queuing up before meeting a human behind a desk who checks your passport, checks your...
We left Utah at a reasonable hour - the previous night's late return from the Grand Canyon was a bit tiring, and we had made the decision that we weren't going to head to the south rim of the canyon after all. I'd been there before, and I have to say that Zion was more beautiful than the bottom of the canyon as I remember it, and we'd seen a pretty spectacular view of the size of the canyon from the north. We decided to head more or less straight to Las Vegas via the Valley of Fire, Lake Mead...